


the things you do for love are gonna come back to you one by one

by jonphaedrus



Category: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Genre: Character Study, Dysfunctional Relationships, Extended Metaphors, Grief/Mourning, Implied Relationships, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Multi, Talmud, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, im at the nge fanfic im at the combination nge fanfic and passover deconstruction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-09
Updated: 2020-11-09
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:14:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27473344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jonphaedrus/pseuds/jonphaedrus
Summary: On Tuesday, Ritsuko Akagi is not wearing lipstick.
Relationships: Akagi Ritsuko/Ikari Gendou, Fuyutsuki Kouzou/Ikari Gendou/Ikari Yui
Comments: 3
Kudos: 5





	the things you do for love are gonna come back to you one by one

**Author's Note:**

> i started this in like, august, and it didnt come to anything until now, which is, i guess, a good summary of my 2020. i definitely meant to write 2k about passover. for sure.
> 
> title from [love love love](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOPCAQi3UMg) by the mountain goats.

On Tuesday, Ritsuko Akagi is not wearing lipstick.

She rides the train at the other end of the car, leaning against the curve of the seat, her head pillowed on the edge of the window, her expression unreadable, her eyes far away. Her roots are showing.

She looks happy.

The tree dies the summer Shinji Ikari turns eight. Shinji doesn’t know the tree dies; he doesn’t know the tree, but Kōzō counts it that way. Memories aren’t really formed properly before the age of three, and what child would remember the experience of being a non-entity, as tangentially involved as the cicadas? But Kōzō thinks of it, that August, when the tree starts to wither, rot creeping up the roots, as he stands underneath it and looks out over the bay.

Shinji Ikari is eight. Yui Ikari is dead. So is this tree.

Without the seasons, without working in a school, his calendar is set by festivals and holidays he no longer celebrates. When the Kishiwada Danjiri comes around, the tree is dead, before the true onset of fall. There and gone in a flash, just like the world. He steels himself, to say goodbye to this place that was _theirs_ , and goes at last one final time on the autumn equinox.

Ritsuko Akagi is there, feeding a stray cat bits of tuna she is fishing out of her onigiri from lunch, stuck together with grains of rice and mayonnaise.

She’s bleached her hair. Her eyes are still hollow with grief. She’s started to wear lipstick, the same shade as her mother’s, and Kōzō thinks about things he should say. Things it would do her good to hear.

He doesn’t say them.

He stands there with her in companionable silence, and thinks about the oak wilt that killed the tree. It grows underground in the roots, spreading around them like beads of dew on the strings of a spiderweb and then from tree to tree, until whole populations die as their water table becomes inhospitable to life.

When Kōzō Fuyutsuki was eleven years old, his parents died in a car accident. His grandmother found Christ in her grief, counting rosary beads between her fingertips and whispering under her breath pleas for another world. He watched her, watched the grieving, picked the bones from the ashes, lit the incense, and began to wonder what made the shape of the human soul. What defined life, what defined death, and what defined the between? How much does a soul weigh? How do you know? How do you know if you’re dead?

Kōzō knows, now, what defines a soul. What it weighs. What it smells like. He knows how life began, and how it will end, in blood and tears and kool-aid that nobody gets a choice about drinking. He’s seen the blood of the covenant and the water of the womb, held in his hands the body of a woman he loved and known he held the shape of heaven. He helped make the plan and draw the map.

As a child, he thought answers would comfort him. There is no comfort in answers. There is no comfort in the knowing, only in the unknown.

On Tuesday, Ritsuko Akagi is not wearing lipstick. On Wednesday, Ritsuko Akagi is not wearing lipstick, and she chews on her cuticle while they ride the train, staring intently at her book, the spine bent backwards so it cracks, until her false nail snaps off.

On Thursday, she laughs. She throws her head back and laughs, and years slough off of her.

On Friday, Gendō comes back to the office.

On Friday, Ritsuko Akagi is wearing lipstick.

When Gendō next leaves the office, drawn by chance and responsibility to Germany, Ritsuko is not wearing lipstick when Kōzō sees her on the train. Her eyes crinkle into a smile. Her body language is open. She’s younger. She wears flats instead of heels. Slacks instead of hose.

At lunchtime, Kōzō goes to her office, taps his newspaper on her half-open door. “Dr. Akagi, are you free?”

She tucks her pencil behind her ear. “Yes?”

Kōzō holds up his lunch. “Would you mind having lunch with me? I was thinking of going topside.”

She hesitates. Just long enough. Just long enough that he knows she’s looking for an answer, not a question. Then she stands and joins him.

Chopsticks click. Carrot sticks crunch. “You seem more relaxed than usual today.”

“Do I?”

“You aren’t wearing lipstick.”

Fingers touch lips, to check, to confirm the observation. “I hadn’t even noticed.”

“Dr. Akagi, do you ever wonder what the question is?”

“What does that have to do with my lipstick?”

A laugh, the rustle of plastic wrap. “Honestly? Nothing. One was an observation, one is a thought I’ve had on my mind lately.”

“Was the lipstick the observation, or was the question the observation?”

“Now you mention it, I’m not sure myself.”

A can, popping loudly open. No lipstick marks on the rim. “What do you think the question is, Commander?”

“Have you ever heard of the Jewish holiday of Pesach? The Japanese name is Sugikoshi.”

“Can’t say I have.”

“It comes every spring, at the same time as Christians celebrate Easter. It commemorates how the Jews were rescued from Eygpt and taken to the promised land of Canaan. To celebrate, they hold elaborate festival meals that can last entire days, called seders. Seder means _order_ in Hebrew, and it is less a meal and more...ritual practices, performed in a perscribed order. One of these practices is the reading of the parable of the four sons.”

“I assume, Commander, you’re going somewhere with this.”

“I’m starting to sound like a professor again, aren’t I? Don’t answer that, Doctor. I Can see it in your eyes. The four sons are just an allegory—the parable is actually about the nature of questions and communal responsibility.”

A raised finger. Straightening the chopsticks. “First, the wise son. The wise son asks his family, ‘what is the meaning of the laws given to us by God?’ because the wise son understands his role in society, and knows that he is, too, governed by those laws.”

(Professor Kōzō Fuyutsuki peers through microscopes, reads every religious text he can get his hands on. He goes to faith healings in the United States and is baptized twice, he shaves his head and lives as a monk for two years, he goes on a pilgrimage through the Holy Land, he fasts for every Ramadan and completes the Hajj. He reads Gnostic scripture and has ecstatic visions, he tries going Clear. He becomes a licensed psychologist; he completes seminary school. He does all this and more in search of some ultimate answer.

He takes calipers and measures the soul, weighs it against itself, stands with the scales and the Ma’at, watches people die in hospitals to track the moment the soul disappears from the flesh.

Every question must have an answer. The soul must either be real or not. The self must either be real or not. The mind must either be real or not. Humanity must _be_ , fragment or whole, self or other, but it must _exist_ , after all. After all. After all.)

“Next comes the wicked son. He believes that he exists outside of the family structure, others himself from his people and society, does not believe that he was saved from bondage in Egypt. He asks ‘what does this mean to _you?’_ for, if he had been in Egypt, he would never have been redeemed. Those who ask for no redemption are not, themselves, ever redeemed.”

(Yui Ikari kills herself. They all watch. Nobody stops her. _It was an accident_ , Kōzō lies, _it was an accident_ Gendō believes, because the alternative is too terrible.

Yui Ikari will never be redeemed.

She will never come out of Egypt, even after Egypt itself is long gone.)

“Then, the simple son. The simple son is young, and has not yet had a chance to grow, to understand, to learn his place in the family and his role in society. He asks ‘what does all of this mean?’ and it is never clear to what he refers. Does he mean the story of Exodus, told every year during the Seder? The Torah, the laws and customs of the Jewish people? The seder? Life itself? The simple son does not yet know that we can only answer the easy questions, so we tell him the best we can, that God freed the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.”

(Doctor Ritsuko Akagi never has a chance to grow up into herself. She is shaped, as are they all, by Second Impact, the end of the world, a murder-suicide that plays out in slow motion over the cooling body of a soulless girl. She gets given all the answers before she has the chance to ask the questions, and her mouth grows hard, her eyes flinty, her heart sore and ill-used.

Would she ask the questions, even if she wanted to? If she knew the right ones to ask? Would she find the answers, if she had to?

It is too late, now, for all that.)

“Finally comes the son who does not yet know how to ask, and his inability is never explained. Perhaps he is too young. Perhaps he is not yet learned enough. Perhaps he has never known the expectations of his role. When he cannot ask, you must tell him—teach him the story, as it has been taught to you, as he shall one day teach it to his children. In the end, he does not even need to ask the question, because he knows that he will be offered an answer, whether he wants one or not.”

(Commander Gendō Ikari closes his eyes and sews shut his mouth and excises his heart, carving it out one scoop at a time. He sits on top of the trap door of the gallows and pretends it’s not open, waiting for him to jump. He looks at the ghost of a dead woman hiding in the body of a child, and instead turns to the body of a dead woman, holding no ghosts at all.

He knows the questions. Once upon a time, he listened as people asked them. He smiled and pretended that he knew the answers. He laughed when he was wrong and lied when he was right.

It’s too much, now, to hold on his own. He cannot ask. He never really wanted to in the first place.

They have simply left him, to teach his children, as he himself was taught.)

A lid popping closed. “I’m sorry, Commander. You’ve lost me.”

“What do _you_ think the question is, Dr. Akagi? Which son are you?”

“I...don’t know. I suppose that makes me the son who doesn’t know how to ask. I’ve gotten used to being given answers, whether or not I want them.” Wry disappointment, self-deprecating horror.

“I’m surprised at you. I would have thought you’d have picked one of the first two.”

The _tack_ of an empty coffee can, being set down on the table a little too hard. “I’m under no delusions. I know I’m part of all this—of humanity. Of life. Of the end of the world. I don’t need to ask what it all means because it doesn’t _matter_ any more. Whether or not I like them, care about them, whatever. If there are any answers left to be found, someone sitting around and thinking about it isn’t going to find them. We’re going to die. We’ll all go together. That’s it. That’s all there is. Life, death, and us.”

“And Commander Ikari?”

“What does this mean to _you_ , he asks.” The coffee can, crushed. “As if he won’t go to the same waiting room in Hell as the rest of us.”

(Kōzō thinks about things he could say. Things it would be good for her to hear.

He doesn’t say them.)

Perhaps, as the sages say, the simple son is the same as the man who once asked to learn the whole of the Torah while standing upon one foot. _Do unto others_ , he was told. _The rest is commentary_.

Where does the cycle begin? Does it begin when the primordial ooze, the LCL ocean, spat out its first single-celled organisms and they begat? Does it begin when humans first wondered if there were questions to be asked? Does it begin in Kōzō’s office, when he falls in love, for the first time, for the last time? Does it begin when Yui first asks him to find the answer? Does it begin in Gendō’s bedroom, and the hearts that break there? Does it begin the day the world ends? Does it begin the day the tree withers and dies? Does it begin when Yui becomes a corpse for Shinji to someday climb into? Does it begin when Ritsuko’s mother kills a child? Does it begin when Ritsuko’s mother kills herself? Does it begin when Kōzō closes his eyes, his heart, and pretends he doesn’t see what Gendō is about to do, and all the people he is going to kill along with it?

It begins in the dark.

It begins in the dark, in the drowning dark, when the light goes out and you have to decide something. Anything.

You have to pick, one or the other. The question. The answer. The redemption. The exodus. The bondage. The freedom. To rebuild the ship of Theseus.

To be. Someone. No-one. Nothing at all.

[To be human is to know that there is a dark for you to be someone in.](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EmZPzn8WMAEJYwc?format=png&name=900x900)


End file.
